Progressive constructions in Germanic are usually studied as progressive constructions—that is, exclusively so. I characterize this as a top-down approach to aspect, which, I argue, harbors the risk of overlooking relevant language-specific structures that are similar in form and meaning. This paper, therefore, advocates taking a bottom-up approach. Based on a case study of the prepositional progressive in Dutch (aan het-progressive), I claim that this approach is of added empirical and theoretical value. Drawing on construction-based theories, the relevant patterns—dubbed situational constructions—are analyzed in terms of horizontal constructional links.*

This paper investigates the aspectual potential of posture verb pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus study of sitzen ‘sit’ and stehen ‘stand’, it is shown that despite a preference for activity verbs, verbs of all aspectual classes occur in the second conjunct. The posture verb imposes its durative meaning component on the second verb, thus making a progressive interpretation of the construction possible. Apart from this emergent aspectual function, German posture verb pseudo-coordination has a subjective function (conveying the speaker’s beliefs about the subject referent’s stance), and a discourse pragmatic function (information packaging).*

Given the common ancestry of Dutch and Afrikaans, it is not surprising that they use similar periphrastic constructions to express progressive meaning: aan het (Dutch) and aan die/’t (Afrikaans) lit. ‘at the’; bezig met/(om) te (Dutch) lit. ‘busy with/to’ and besig om te lit. ‘busy to’ (Afrikaans); and so-called cardinal posture verb constructions (zitten/sit ‘sit’, staan ‘stand’, liggen/lê ‘lie’ and lopen/loop ‘walk’), CPV te (‘to’ Dutch) and CPV en (‘and’ Afrikaans). However, these cognate constructions have grammaticalized to different extents. To assess the exact nature of these differences, we analyzed the constructions with respect to overall frequency, collocational range, and transitivity (compatibility with transitive predicates and passivizability). We used two corpora that are equal in size (both about 57 million words) and contain roughly the same types of written text. It turns out that the use of periphrastic progressives is generally more widespread in Afrikaans than in Dutch. As far as grammaticalization is concerned, we found that the Afrikaans aan die- and CPV-constructions, as well as the Dutch bezig- and CPV-constructions, are semantically restricted. In addition, only the Afrikaans besig- and CPV en-constructions allow passivization, which is remarkable for such periphrastic expressions.*

This experimental study investigates event construal by early Dutch–German bilinguals, as reflected in their oral depiction of everyday events shown in video clips. The starting point is the finding that the expression of an aspectual perspective (progressive aspect), and its consequences for event construal, is dependent on the extent to which means are grammaticalized, as in English (e.g., progressive aspect) or not, as in German (von Stutterheim & Carroll, 2006). The present study shows that although speakers of Dutch and German have comparable means to mark this aspectual concept, at a first glance at least, they differ markedly both in the contexts as well as in the extent to which this aspectual perspective is selected, being highly frequent in specific contexts in Dutch, but not in German. The present experimental study investigates factors that lead to the use of progressive aspect by early bilinguals, using video clips (with different types of events varied along specific dimensions on a systematic basis). The study includes recordings of eye movements, and examines how far an aspectual perspective drives allocation of attention during information intake while viewing the stimulus material, both for and while speaking. Although the bilinguals have acquired the means to express progressive aspect in Dutch, their use shows a pattern that differs from monolingual Dutch speakers. Interestingly, these differences are reflected in different patterns in the direction of attention (eye movements) when verbalizing information on events.